Why PBIS doesn't work, problems with positive reinforcement in schools.

 When Structure and Discipline Were Freedom: What a Reality Show Experiment Revealed About Modern Education's Failures. 

Remember when schools had clear rules and students knew exactly where they stood? A reality show in 2003 recreated that world—and students thrived. Meanwhile, today's schools spend billions on positive reinforcement programs while student depression soars. This article explores what we lost when we abandoned structure for 'touchy-feely' innovation.

The Experiment That Changed Everything

In 2003, something remarkable happened on British television. Channel 4's "That'll Teach 'Em" took thirty teenagers fresh from their GCSEs and placed them in a meticulously recreated 1950s British boarding school environment for four weeks. No phones. No modern distractions. Just strict discipline, clear expectations, and consequences that actually meant something.

The setup was simple but radical: students were expected to board at a traditional school house, abiding by strict discipline, adopting a 1950s/1960s diet and following a strict uniform dress code, with the only difference being the absence of corporal punishment as it was made illegal in all state schools in Britain in 1986. The show ran for three series through 2006, testing both high-achieving grammar school students and those from secondary modern backgrounds.

The results? They weren't what the architects of modern education wanted to hear.

Many participants reported learning more in those four intense weeks than in their entire modern educational careers. But even more telling was what one girl said about finally experiencing what it meant to be a child—safe, bounded, relieved of the exhausting performance of premature adulthood that contemporary schooling demands. When the experiment ended, she lamented having to return to a world where children are burdened with the weight of self-management, swimming in a sea of shifting standards and confusing boundaries.

The Bribery Industrial Complex

Fast forward to 2025, and education has become an unending parade of novelty masquerading as innovation. Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) was developed during the 1980s by researchers at the University of Oregon, emerging from behaviorism and applied behavior analysis. By 2023, PBIS had been adopted in over 25,000 schools across the U.S. and internationally.

On paper, it sounds reasonable: define clear expectations, teach appropriate behaviors, reinforce positive conduct. In practice? It's become something else entirely—a system that reduces human dignity to token economies and sticker charts.

The problem isn't that PBIS is theoretically flawed; it's that the PBIS method is far too easy to get wrong, with teachers far too easily using consequences or the threat of consequences to motivate behavior. What was meant to be a comprehensive framework has devolved into superficial compliance-chasing. PBIS systems focus on positive reinforcement but always include punitive measures like predetermined fines or loss of points in classwide economy systems.

And here's the uncomfortable truth that research has been trying to tell us for decades: tangible rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation, with particularly strong effects on school-aged children. When you bribe children to behave, although tangible rewards may control immediate behaviors, they have negative consequences for subsequent interest, persistence, and preference for challenge, especially for children.

Studies have shown that performance-contingent rewards, where rewards are directly tied to performance, have the most detrimental effect on intrinsic motivation because they can make students feel like they are only doing the task for the reward. We're not building character. We're building reward-chasers.

The Real Cost

The consequences play out in the data, stark and undeniable. Mental health now accounts for 23.1 percent of the total disease burden for adolescents in the United States, surpassing physical health issues such as asthma and injuries. Nearly 60 percent of youth with major depression do not receive the mental health treatment they need.

Look deeper into K-12 settings and the picture grows darker. In the 2024-2025 academic year, there was a 61% increase from the previous school year in concerns expressed by staff about students exhibiting depression, anxiety, trauma, or emotional dysregulation. Approximately half of public schools reported they could effectively provide mental health services to all students in need—meaning half cannot.

Among the youngest learners, nearly 40% of high school students report ongoing feelings of sadness or hopelessness, with the CDC indicating that 20% of high school students have seriously contemplated suicide, while 9% have made attempts.

There's a grim irony here: we've spent decades implementing "trauma-informed" practices and positive reinforcement schemes, yet critics argue that PBIS serves as a way to label, punish, and surveil students, which is antithetical to trauma-informed education. We've created systems that claim to support children while fundamentally disrespecting their capacity for moral reasoning and self-determination.

What We Lost When We Abandoned Structure

The genius of traditional education—the kind that "That'll Teach 'Em" temporarily resurrected—wasn't cruelty. It was clarity. Children knew where they stood. Expectations were transparent. Consequences were predictable. Within those firm boundaries, there was paradoxically more freedom: freedom from the anxiety of ambiguity, freedom from performing constant self-regulation before the brain is developmentally ready, freedom to actually be a child.

Critics note that Skinner, whose behaviorism underlies PBIS, completely rejected the idea of free will, believing we only behaved the way we did because of the reinforcement we received. This philosophical foundation sends a devastating message to students: you cannot be trusted to make good decisions and must be rewarded or punished over and over again.

The bitter reality is that in many schools where PBIS is implemented, there are restrictions on how misbehavior is handled, with teachers often not allowed to send students to the office until certain conditions are reached. This creates an illusion of success—look how few referrals we're getting!—while actual disorder festers in classrooms where teachers have been stripped of authority.

The Path Forward

If Christopher Hitchens were alive to witness this carnival of dysfunction, he would skewer the educational-industrial complex for its "flexing"—contorting itself to accommodate every fad and sensitivity while snapping the backs of children and educators in the process. No civilization ever secured its future by bribing its way to virtue.

What works—what has always worked—is devastatingly simple: order, consequence, and the dignity of genuinely formative boundaries. Not the chaos of modern "child-centered" approaches that ask six-year-olds to self-regulate like CEOs. Not the insult of token economies that treat human motivation as a simple input-output machine. Not the therapeutic language that pathologizes childhood while simultaneously asking children to shoulder adult burdens.

Schools should be sanctuaries where children can learn within structures that honor their developmental needs, not laboratories for the latest pedagogical experiment or profit centers for curriculum companies. The lesson from "That'll Teach 'Em" isn't about nostalgia for corporal punishment or rigid gender segregation. It's about recognizing that clear expectations, meaningful consequences, and predictable structure aren't oppressive—they're liberating.

A Call to Sanity

The evidence is overwhelming. Research shows that when PBIS is implemented correctly and with fidelity, negative student behaviors decrease, but the framework needs full support from staff and administration to work appropriately. Yet we rarely implement anything with true fidelity because we're too busy chasing the next initiative, the next grant, the next marketable solution.

Meanwhile, children suffer. The Hope Center's 2023-2024 Student Basic Needs Survey Report states that 54 percent of students named mental health as one of their reasons for stopping out of college. We're breaking them before they even reach adulthood, asking them to carry the weight of poorly designed systems and confusing messages about who they are and what's expected of them.

If we truly care about the souls and futures of our children—and I believe most educators desperately do—we must stop chasing the shiny and new. We must cease contorting ourselves into pedagogical pretzels to satisfy the latest research du jour or accommodate the demands of educational consultants selling the next miracle cure.

We need to recover the principles that stood the test of time: clear expectations, meaningful structure, authentic consequence, and the profound respect embedded in believing children capable of rising to high standards rather than requiring constant external manipulation to behave.

The price for our current path is paid in heartbreak, in rising suicide rates, in exodus from public schools, in a generation that knows they're drowning but doesn't understand why the adults keep throwing them pool toys instead of teaching them to swim.

It's time to stop flexing. It's time to stand firm. Our children deserve nothing less than adults willing to provide the structured freedom that allows childhood to unfold as it should: bounded, safe, and genuinely formative.

The question isn't whether we have the knowledge to fix this. The question is whether we have the courage to abandon our cherished innovations and return to what we know actually works.